Yeah, that was one of the other reasons I thought it may have been a bug. Most races seem to get maybe a 50% damage bonus in the weapons they specialize in. Even celestial ion cannons are good, but not insanely good. The celestial death ray seems to get such a huge bonus. Every non-celestial death ray I've encountered has had such low stats that's it's practically unusable, yet the celestial death ray is amazing.
I've also noticed what makes it particularly tough is that the celestial death ray has high hull damage and is so often combined with other energy weapons (lasers, ion, mega plasma) that are great and taking down shields, because celestials tend to favor those weapons. So they have an a very effective way to strip shields and hull.
Compare that to Trolgar, who are extremely scary if you lose your shields, but are generally pretty ineffective as long as you can keep your shields up. The scary trolgar flak cannons also have fairly limited range. I can play around trolgar for the most part, by beefing up my shields and keeping distance, but I've yet to find any strategy that works against celestial death rays.
